NS December 16th, 2009
Though I know all about the recession and that unemployment is scarily high (7.9% in the UK and 10% in the US), I’ve been lucky in that no one close to me has lost their job or their house or anything like that. Sure, everyone is downsizing and being careful and cutting back and worrying, but it hadn’t had a personal, possibly profound effect on me until Monday. Because two days ago, while I ran between my bedroom and bathroom in the midst of a violent and unforgiving stomach virus, The Noble Husband (who had the same virus, on the same day) came to inform me that his boss had just called and told him that his role had been terminated at the company he is contracted out to and that after Christmas he is to report back to his employer’s offices where they will “try to find him something but there are no guarantees.”
No guarantees. In January, the worst month of the year for lay-offs, in what is the worst time for jobs in the UK in 13 years. And we are told this while being violently ill and 11 days before Christmas. The timing was impeccable, let me tell you.
I rolled around in bed, writhing in pain from the hot knife of pain in my stomach, while hot tears rolled down my face. I would’ve sobbed if I hadn’t thought it would only make me sick again. I wouln’t have ordered that last set of gifts from Amazon, only hours earlier, if I had known this was going to happen. I wouldn’t have had my hair cut and highlighted, wouldn’t have gone for lunch with my friend on Saturday, wouldn’t have stopped into Costa for all those lattes. Couldawouldashoulda, as they say. What’s done is done.
As I lay in bed that night, drained and exhausted in more ways than one, I began calculating in my head. Even if TNH’s employers were able to keep him on at their offices, he would go back to his base salary and there would be no overtime. Without overtime we only barely (and I mean barely) make it from paycheque to paycheque. The little amount of money I earn each month (a couple hundred quid, at best) pays for our cleaner and childcare, only recently-begun endeavours that were supposed to free up some of my time so I could write, and have some time away from the children to be myself again. It was a luxury, I know, but I felt that after years of living bare bones I deserved it. I deserved a shot at a career too, didn’t I? I deserved a few hours a week without the kids hanging off my legs, whining and crying and with snot crusting onto my trousers, right? And at the time, I really convinced myself that I did. I thought I could write my book proposal, set up a new website to go along with it and kickstart a freelance career, all with the 11 hours a week I had to myself.
Who the hell was I kidding?
Don’t I know that this is the stuff of delusional, pampered houswives with no control over their own financial destinies? Isn’t this exactly the kind of head-in-the-clouds, puffed up thing a writer thinks of herself, especially one with no other discernible way to support herself or her family if crunch time came? I mean, sure, I could go out and get an admin job in some office somewhere, like the one I was in before I left to have my first child and to which I never returned, but it wouldn’t pay the bills. It wouldn’t even come close to paying the bills, let alone food or clothes or anything like that.
Because the reality is that writing this blog doesn’t earn me a single goddamn penny (nor do I want it to) and I’m sinking my pay into childcare and for someone else to do my cleaning so I could pursue some half-arsed pipe dream that couldn’t buy us a loaf of bread at the moment.
But while a part of me feels that I was just kidding myself that this good thing could last and that I’d be able to do all I’ve ever aspired to do, another part of me is so incredibly angry and sad. If (and it’s a very likely ‘if’) my husband doesn’t find another job that pays more in the next couple months, we’ll be back to living hand to mouth again and I will have to use every scrap of whatever we’ve got to buy necessities, not niceties. So goodbye childcare, cleaners and coffees…it was nice for the whole two months that it lasted. And I know that sounds so incredibly fucking privileged and middle class and entitled, but god damn it, I had waited for it and worked for it and longed for it and I’m afraid that if I go back to absolutely no time to myself, no time to write, no time just being me, that I may seriously lose the plot. I was only hanging on by a very thin thread as it was — now that thread feels like it’s being wound round my neck and pulled tight.
To make me feel even more like a whiny little princess, when I asked my neighbour this morning if there’s any way I could dry one load of towels in her tumble dryer because we’d all been sick and I had laundry coming out of my ears and my sister arriving tomorrow for her three week stay, she looked at me uneasily and said “Sure, if you can hook it up to your electricity.”
I looked at her, puzzled and said “Sorry, what do you mean?”
She nodded her head towards her husband, who had just gone inside the house, and said “Well he’s not been working in ages, has he? We’re skint. It costs too much money to run the tumble dyer so we stopped using it. Maybe try the launderette up the road?”
I apologised profusely and told her I hadn’t even thought of the cost of electricity to her and wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I went inside, shut the door and had to fight back tears. Right before Christmas and people can’t pay their electricity bills and others are losing jobs or have been out of jobs for months, like my neighbour. And here I am worrying about having to go back to caring for my children full time and having to scrub my own toilet again and staying up late to write instead of doing it during the day. Boo fuckin’ hoo.
I’ve got my ticket, waiting to see if it will be stamped; waiting to see if we’ll climb aboard the Unemployment Train or merely have to downgrade to Economy Class. Lots of people are already on the train, it will be crowded. People who have lost their homes, their cars, their possessions, their dreams — they’ll all be there. Those of us who haven’t lost anything but stand in limbo with fingers crossed will be there too. But whereas before I didn’t think I’d ever have a reason to ride, I now know that all of us, any of us, could be called aboard at any time.
Welcome to the recession, bitches. We’re in for a bumpy ride.
Photo credit
